Say the number first
Our fee is quoted before we start work, not buried in a margin you'll never see. If a trip can't be done for your budget, you'll hear that in the first conversation rather than the fifth.
Since 2017
Eleven people in Guarda, planning the world.
Meridian AeroPath Travels is a small, deliberately small, travel agency in Guarda. We plan long-haul journeys out of Portugal for people who'd rather have judgement than a search box.
RNAVT 0000
IATA Licensed Agent
Guarantee Fund Protected
24/7 Emergency Line
No Hidden Card Fees
APAVT Member Agency
2017
Two desks, nine clients
Our story
We started because the phone stopped being answered.
Inês Carvalho spent thirteen years inside a large corporate travel management company, watching the job she'd trained for get slowly replaced by a queue. Consultants stopped owning files. Clients stopped getting names. The advice that made the job worth doing got priced out of the model.
Meridian opened in 2017 on a fairly narrow bet: that a meaningful number of people would still pay for a person who knows their trip. Nine clients followed her out the door. Nine years later there are eleven of us, we're still in the same building, and we've held the team size deliberately flat.
The name is literal. A meridian is a line of longitude — the arbitrary human decision that lets you say where you are and how far you've come. An aeropath is the route you take across it. That's the entire job, really.
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Journeys planned
€0m
Recovered in 2020
What we hold to
Six rules we don't bend.
Every agency has values on a wall. These are the ones that have actually cost us money, which is the only real test of one.
Answer the phone
Every client gets a direct line to the consultant who designed their trip. Not a queue, not a ticket, not a chatbot. The median callback on our after-hours line last year was eleven minutes.
Know it, or don't sell it
A destination goes on our list once one of us has worked it on the ground. That's why there are twenty-two and not four hundred. We'd rather send you somewhere else than fake it.
Plan for the bad day
Anyone can book the good version of a trip. We design around connection risk, weather windows and what happens when a carrier cancels — because that's the day you'll remember.
Fewer, better trips
We won't upsell you a fourth city. Most itineraries that come to us are trying to do too much, and the single most valuable thing we do is take things out.
Stay small on purpose
Eleven people. We've turned down the growth that would mean you get whoever's free instead of the person who knows your file. That's a deliberate ceiling, not a stage.
9 years
Same address
How we got here
Nine years, one address.
Including the year the entire industry stopped. Especially that one.
2017
Two desks off the praça
Inês leaves a corporate TMC after thirteen years and opens Meridian with one other consultant, one printer and a client list of nine people — all of whom followed her over.
2019
RNAVT licence & the move to Monsenhor Mendes do Carmo
Registration with Turismo de Portugal comes through, and with it the corporate work. We take the premises on Avenida Monsenhor Mendes do Carmo — on a street people actually walk down, which matters more than it sounds.
2020
The year of refunds
No new bookings for fourteen months. We spent it recovering €2.4m in client funds from collapsed carriers and wholesalers. We didn't make a cent and we didn't lose a client.
2022
Borders reopen, and the phone doesn't stop
The rebound is chaos — capacity is down, fares are up, and everyone's credits are expiring. It was the year that proved the whole model. We doubled the team.
2024
The corporate programme finds its shape
Fourteen managed accounts across the Beira Interior and a proper duty-of-care platform. Rui builds the reporting layer that finance directors actually ask us for by name.
2026
Eleven people, same address
Same office, same phone number, same ceiling on how big we're willing to get. Roughly 14,200 journeys planned and counting.
The boring, important part
Accreditation & your money.
Travel agencies fail. When one does, the only thing that matters is whether your money was somewhere it could be recovered from.
RNAVT 0000
Our registration in the Registo Nacional dos Agentes de Viagens e Turismo, held with Turismo de Portugal. Every agency trading in Portugal must hold one and must publish it — including on a page like this. If an agency won't show you its number, that tells you something.
IATA licensed
We issue airline tickets directly rather than through a consolidator. It's why we can rebook you at 2am while everyone else is queuing at a service desk — the booking is ours to touch.
Guarantee fund, not a promise
We pay into the Fundo de Garantia de Viagens e Turismo and carry the liability insurance required by Decreto-Lei n.º 17/2018. If this agency ever failed, your money and your repatriation are covered by that fund rather than by our balance sheet. Insurance certificate on request.
NIF 000 000 000
Registered for IVA under the special scheme for travel agencies. A proper factura is issued and filed on every transaction, with your NIF on it if you want it there — which corporate finance teams appreciate more than we expected.
In their words
Mostly from the trips that went wrong.
Our TAP leg out of Lisbon was cancelled six hours before departure. Meridian had us rerouted through Madrid and into Rome only two hours later than planned — before the airline's own app had even updated.
Inês Rodrigues
Grand Europe by Rail · March 2026
We'd booked the Maldives ourselves twice before. The difference was the villa choice — they moved us off the sunset side to a quieter reef, and it made the whole week.
Bruno Teixeira
Maldives Overwater Escape · January 2026
Twelve days in Japan with two kids under ten and not one meltdown over logistics. Every transfer was where they said it would be. That's worth the fee on its own.
Catarina Lopes
Japan: Neon & Nature · November 2025
A short walk from the Sé
The coffee's on, and there's parking outside.
Consultations are by appointment so you get a full hour with the consultant who'll actually run your file — not whoever happens to be free. Av. Monsenhor Mendes do Carmo 43, 6300-586 Guarda, Portugal.
Av. Monsenhor Mendes do Carmo 43, 6300-586 Guarda, Portugal · Consultations by appointment